


Reprieve

by KIBITZER



Series: The Fathoms Below [2]
Category: Umineko no Naku Koro ni | When the Seagulls Cry
Genre: Canon-Typical Messy Witch Morality, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical Weird Romance, F/F, In Hindsight Featherine Should Probably Have Seen All This Coming, TFB: "darkest affection" is just code for "blackrom"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 02:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15764925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KIBITZER/pseuds/KIBITZER
Summary: Lady Featherine knows when she has been given a victory.(Set before the events ofThe Fathoms Below: First Stanza)





	Reprieve

**Author's Note:**

> ah, fuck, i cant believe ive done this

They never make arrangements, but Lady [     ] always knows where to find her.

It had been millennia of it. The air was dark and moody. Featherine had conjured a world and then a night to spend in it, a repose after a decades-long game. It was the privilege of the victor; a velvet-blood sky, a decanter of wine, a pitch-black inkwell.

She wrote, diligently keeping the record, cataloguing the game she had played for storage in the Capital of Books. It had been one of Lady [     ]’s finest works.

And that was when she was found. As if thinking the thought of her was enough to summon Lady [     ]—a familiar kind of weight settled between Featherine’s shoulder blades, and she knew she was being observed.

Featherine sighed and set her pen down and carefully put the cap back on her ink.

“You may as well reveal yourself,” she said. “I know very well when you draw near.”

Lady [     ] appeared in a whorl of fabric, all cloaked in inky blues and purples. She did not seem upset to have been spotted. Rather, she smiled, her hands open, palms facing the ceiling. Empty-handed—so, not here for battle. Featherine quirked an eyebrow.

“You are far too prickly,” Lady [     ] admonished her. “As victor, you have earned the right to gloat, you know.”

“I am tired,” Featherine said, and with a wipe of her hand, the tools on her desk melted into the darkness. The candles brightened slightly, as if they could ever hope to reach into the shadow that obscured Lady [     ].

“Should I go?”; Lady [     ] asked.

“It is fine,” Featherine said. “You are fine. Have a seat. Have some wine.”

“You are far too hospitable,” the Unfathomable said, but took a seat in the chair Featherine conjured for her and accepted a glass.

Pouring wine did not require her hands, but Featherine still grasped the decanter and filled both glasses herself.

“I lost fairly,” Lady [     ] said, sipping her wine. “You should be elated by now.”

Featherine smiled and looked askance, swirling her wine in silence for a moment before drinking deep of it. “No, you did not,” she said. “I know when I am being given victory.”

Lady [     ] seemed offended. It was often difficult to tell; her emotions were more like subtle ocean tides, invisible to the eye by perceptible by those who knew its stream. Featherine felt her moods in the very air around them. “Lady Featherine, I do not **give** victories.”

Featherine didn't miss the titling nor the annoyed twist to the Unfathomable’s tone. She smiled into her glass. For all her imperceptible nature, Lady [     ] was easy to read off the battlefield. They had known one another far too long, Featherine thought—far longer than witches should.

It blurred the lines, time. They wore naked contempt for one another and yet could only truly find companionship in one another. They were equally ancient, equally isolated. The divide between friend and foe was slippery to a lot of witches—to Creators even more so.

Lady [     ] rose from her seat and set her glass down on Featherine’s writing desk, kept her hand planted there so she was leaning over her. The candle on the table cast her face in flickering oranges, her eyes finally illuminated, and Featherine knew: few could ever hope to perceive Lady [     ] the way she could. She saw Lady [     ]’s expression, drawn into mixed agitation and humor, the way the light played in her eyes, the way her skin creased as she smiled.

“You let me win,” Featherine said. “And you may never admit it. But here is the fact of the matter: it was a beautiful game.”

“It doesn't fucking matter who won,” Lady [     ] drawled, her voice low, her face fully visible, her true natures unveiled in yellows and oranges. She always ended up dropping her act when they were alone together. She always loved being rough. “You and I know that, Aurora.”

Nobody called her that.

Nobody except Lady [     ].

“Is that how it is?” Featherine said, straightening in her seat slightly, fixing Lady [     ] with a challenge in her stare. “I suppose when you’ve lost, it's convenient to say it did not matter, [        ].”

The Unfathomable smiled when she heard Featherine use her name. “You're so god damn annoying,” she said. “Do you know that?”

“I'm well aware,” Featherine said.

Lady [     ] shook her head and scoffed, but there was some measure of affection in their mutual darkness. Yes, there was disdain between them, even hatred on a good day; but maybe that in itself was the fuel that drove them to pursue one another. Resentment was less predictable. Raw loathing was a thrill punctuated by a kiss. There was a mix of every base emotion at once, and that may be precisely why they always chose each other. Like being loved into a thousand pieces, an abrasion of affection, sanding one’s self down to only bone—to be ever so gently taken apart.

Even now, Featherine sat up straight and reached up to seize Lady [     ]’s face, to shut her up properly, to bring this game to a close.

Featherine kissed her, spoils of the victor, prize freely given.

Lady [     ] leaned over her, heavy as an ocean, draped in an oilslick, and Featherine thought—like she always did—of whether she could disappear in it, be smothered out by Lady [     ]’s darkness forever, and what would happen if she did. She wasn’t unknowable in the way Lady [     ] was. She couldn’t be certain in the way Lady [     ] was. But the thought of being crushed out of existence by that heft of wine-dark cloth, by the willpower of the Absolute, was delightful.

“Don’t worry,” Lady [     ] said, low and breathy against her face: “I’m going to destroy you in the end.”

And Featherine laughed and snarled, “You’re welcome to fucking try it,” and kissed her again. There was such a greed in it, there always was, and Lady [     ] reciprocated in equal measures, a Voracious Witch to the end. She was insatiable, empty and hungry, but Featherine was greedy, too.

She knew she was the only one who could do this. That was exactly what was intoxicating. She took Lady [     ]’s hands and kissed them, traced the inside of her palms, ghosted along her bare arms. Lady [     ] mumbled something sweet and hateful in her ear, sickly honey against her teeth, a blessed indulgence. Featherine knew she meant it, meant every scathing word of it, and she replied in equal terms, slipping curses between kisses. She accused Lady [     ] of everything, of giving up victory without a fight—and the Unfathomable called it a gift.

It felt like the world had gotten smaller. The set she had made to rest in, floating in the endless abyssal sea, had shrunk. Like it was only big enough to house herself and Lady [     ], the walls now pressing in around her, coaxing them closer—closer still, heart to heart and further, bone splintered into marrow, blood mixed into one. One and the same being. Hearts colliding like planets, like warring supernovas, like stardust melding together to form something new—an embrace of gods.

Lady [     ] kissed the column of her throat. Her teeth grazed the skin where Featherine’s jugular vein lay. A younger witch might have shied at that, but Featherine knew: Lady [     ] would not bite down, not properly, and leaned her head back as if daring her to do it. To predators like them, to gods like them, holding one another by the throat was less about the danger, more about the trust. More about the symbol of it all. Even if Lady [     ] tore her throat out, Featherine would not die—they both knew that, as the ritual went on, as Lady [     ]’s teeth languidly found blood—it was a metaphorical vulnerability. It was performative trust. It was ritualized behavior. It said _I cannot be killed but I_ _’d let it be you._

If either of them were to die, it would only be at the hand of the other. They had made that vow, in sacred words, a long time ago.

Lady [     ] was strong; Featherine knew that, was confident in her. She was still more confident in herself. She could match the Unfathomable; she could beat Absolute Certainty; but then, if she won the grandest game and destroyed her nemesis, what would be left to her?

It was better to let things be the way they were. She knew if she herself were to die, Lady [     ] would soon lapse into the same dreadful boredom, that lonely kind of resentment. They were the worst, but they were mutually so; equally so; they were so together. They were awful against each other, with one another, inside and beyond each other, and being apart—separated by Death—could spell nothing but doom for them both.

Yet Featherine dared her to try, in between heavy breaths and marrow-deep touch—dared her to kill her in earnest, playing with fire, escalating as Lady [     ] did. She dared her to fucking try, and Lady [     ] promised her, in equal amounts adoration and spite:

My love, I will destroy you wholly.


End file.
